Hale: The mockingbirds don't sing in the country

By Leon Hale |
April 18, 2011

You've caught me at home for a change, here on the sixth floor of the high-rise apartment building, not far inside the West Loop.

I'm at my old work station by the south window that gives me a long look toward Greenway Plaza, and right now, I'm really busy listening to a mockingbird performing on the top of a nearby power pole.

We've been spending a lot of time up at the old Winedale house, and spring in Washington County is a mighty nice place to be. But after we've been up there a while, here we come back to town, to get something we can't have in the country.

Mockingbirds, for instance.

Sure, Washington County has plenty of mockingbirds, but not one of them sings within earshot of that old Winedale house, and we haven't been able to attract any. I don't thrive for long periods without hearing mockers. To me it's the music of Texas.

One thing I like about this apartment building is that in its back yard there's a fertile supply of mockingbirds, singing and nesting and increasing the population.

Since we came back to town, I drove over to my old bachelor neighborhood, where I lived for 11 years before my partner and I got married. I wanted to see if I could still hear mockers there. I like to think I helped introduce them to that part of Houston.

This is a neighborhood tucked just inside the West Loop where Post Oak hooks beneath the freeway and takes two more blocks to die. The street names suggest the area is forested with post oak trees and briars. Briar Hollow Lane. Post Oak Park Drive. Briar Oaks Lane. Post Oak Parkway.

That's where I had a ground-floor apartment that came with a little strip of dirt. I raised chili peppers there, and mockingbirds. A pair of mockers nested several years in a big pyracantha bush just outside the window from my work station. I protected their babies from the cats. Tried to, anyway.

These weren't my cats. They belonged to other and unknown residents. Maybe their former owners had moved away and left them, which is likely because people don't stay in apartments very long. Couple of years, on average, and sometimes when they depart, they don't take everything they came with.

But you don't need to worry about an old tomcat left behind that way, in an apartment complex. He'll do all right. He'll set up his territory, and fight for it, and live out of the garbage cans if he can't get anything better.

Some nights the cats were an entertainment. When I returned to the scene the other day, I noticed that what I thought of as a feline battleground had been replaced by a surface that surely doesn't generate as much racket.

During my residency, the roofs of the carports were covered in corrugated metal. Once in a while a pair of those old toms would meet for combat in the middle of the night, on a carport roof. All those claws scraping on that metal, mixed in with the yowling and the squalling — what a magnificent racket.

The only more interesting noise I heard in that place was made by the newlyweds that moved into the apartment just above me. Hoo boy, you wouldn't believe, day and night they - but wait a minute, I think I've told you about that before. If I didn't, I meant to.

I should have taken better notes, on my time in that apartment. I'm more interested in it now than when I lived there.

Did I ever tell you about the young woman who lived up on third and had a dog named Nathan Detroit? And he wouldn't stay home? He'd go around scratching on doors, and if you let him in he'd go to sleep on your sofa and spend the night.

He liked my place and spent several nights with me. Now and then, you'd need to call his mistress and tell her where Nathan Detroit was and that he was all right.

In that place, we had what I thought of as the screaming woman. Sometimes she'd let out an awful whoop, as if she were being attacked. If you rushed to her place to see if you could save her from being murdered, you'd find her all shrugged up in a corner, trying to hide from a harmless spider on the wall or a little green lizard spending some time on her coffee table.

Then we had the couple on the second floor who fought all the time, and let fly the loudest, most creative profanity that you heard all over the east wing. Almost every Saturday night they …

No, hold on now. I've wandered off the trail. I went back to my old neighborhood to check the mockingbirds. And they're still there, and singing very well. It pleases me to imagine that these singers are descended from some of those baby birds I saved from the cats in 1986.